Of Hanks and Cables

I really want to make fingerless gloves. Z and I did not put the heat on until Thursday when the temperature dropped below 20 and the wind chill was hovering around the smaller end of the single digit numbers. I can deal with it being cold in the apartment by putting on extra layers and curling up under a blanket, but hands, fingers and toes are always, always freezing. Z of course does not notice a thing. He is fine in his underwear resting his bare feet on the couch with toes waving in the air and will frequently look at me in surprise when it’s absolutely freezing in here because I have on sweatpants, a long sleeve shirt, a sweatshirt, my bathrobe and am under a blanket. So, specifically, I want to make these fingerless gloves. However, they require a few skills that I have not even begun to learn yet including knitting in the round and cable knits. Therefore, I am first making this good ole cabled scarf for my friend that I recently visited who also has an extremely cold house.

First I needed yarn. I already had the cable needles from an earlier stop to a yarn store when I found out I needed a yarn needle to make Z’s scarf not have weird little tails all hanging off of it. The pattern says to use Rowan Cork, but I’ve recently found out that stores never have the yarn the pattern calls for and that I don’t know enough about yarn to figure out a good substitute. I’ve also recently found out that all yarn stores are their own unique little universes onto themselves and the place that I set out for yesterday near my apartment was no exception. It’s called Seaport Yarn.

I’ve walked down William Street many, many, many times and I’ve never noticed a yarn store. There’s good reason for that. There’s no way to tell there’s a yarn store in there at 135 William. It looks like an apartment building. There’s a door with the address written on the step and a doorman at a desk inside. No sign. No name written on the buzzer. Nothing. I almost went straight home but another woman walked in, signed her name at the desk and went to the elevator. Encouraged, I decided to try it. I walked in and asked the doorman, who told me to go the 5^th floor and then asked, “First time?” Inside the store are rooms and rooms and hallways filled with yarn. Almost like someone’s apartment with just bins and bins of yarn and some slightly office supply like things around. The women working at the store were very helpful. In the end, I wound up with Aussi Wool W 31 Peacock which was very affordable.

What I didn’t realize until I came home was that I had two hanks of wool, not two skeins and that I had to wind this up into a ball in order to knit. Debbie Stoller advises you to either use a friend's hands for this or your own feet. Neither of these options worked for me, but I managed to not make the yarn into a knot just by laying out the hank next to me. And then I started the cable knit scarf. Really the hardest thing about knitting cables is remembering what row you are on.

Here’s the beginning with some “action” shots. Of course after I took them I realized that the cable needle was supposed to hang down the other side of the piece on this particular row so I had to take all the stitches out and do the row again.

1. Put the next three stitches on the cable needle:

2. Continue knitting, letting the cable needle hang on whatever side of your work the pattern says (ha ha):

3. Then knit the stitches from the cable needle:

Front of work:

Back of work:

I really hadn't considered that the back of a cable doesn't really look like much. It's supposed to make the scarf warmer, but I really prefer scarves to be reversible.